Such changes can add welcome variety to gameplay, but sometimes these (usually brief) segments are poorly implemented and only serve to disrupt the otherwise genial flow of the game. They hurt somewhat less when they're presented as genuine mini-games that you can practice or skip at your own discretion, such as in a Wide Open Sandbox, but heaven forbid if they're required for 100% Completion, or, worse, part of the main game. In this case they may become Scrappy Levels.

Examples:

The dancing and rhythm minigames in The Legend of Zelda Oracle games. And they are required to progress, and caused many players to become stuck in them due to their high difficulty, especially the rhythm one, which can be insanely hard if you've never played a Rhythm game before.

Two sections in the Game Of The Film of Batman Begins had you suddenly driving the Tumbler. But anything involving the Tumber falls under Rule of Cool, so that's okay.

The Adventures of Batman and Robin, from animated series fame, had after several platforming levels where you beat up random thugs, suddenly you driving the Batmobile in a car chase with Two-Face. It's also the resident Scrappy Level.

Batman video games love to break up gameplay with Batmobile driving levels, dating back at least as far as Ocean Software's Batman: The Movie game for various computers.

While you would expect a lightcycle race or two in the video game Tron 2.0, they show up in some strange places at the end.

The Super Nintendo Jurassic Park game (not to be confused with games of that name for other platforms) is an overhead action/adventure game outdoors and a first-person shooter indoors. Oddly enough, the first-person shooter segments were almost trivially easy, whereas the outdoor segments could be difficult at times, what with the enemies abruptly jumping out from under nearby foliage.

Beyond Good & Evil features, in addition to the primary puzzle-solving and stealth-based gameplay, several tracks' worth of hovercraft racing. (Luckily, you only have to enter one race to beat the game, and you don't even have to win it, just find the hidden passageway on the racetrack.) And the first and last dungeons are action and puzzle-oriented, while the second and third (but moreso the third) are stealth-oriented. Also, the fight against the penultimate boss is a shoot-em-up.

Monster Rancher EVO gets shades of this from the fandom, seeing as it toned the monster-raising simulation bits down and turned up the RPG-like customization of the games.

The other minigame, Mukimuki SD: Memorial. When you activate it, you'll find that it appears to be a dating sim... but then, suddenly, with almost an audible *POP*, the girl turns into a feminist Snatcher, the mascot of the game, METAL FISH MSX 3 TURBO R PLUS, appears, and you begin dueling the girl in a parody of the game Snatcher. It's an Unexpected Gameplay Change inside an Unexpected Gameplay Change!!

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is, for the most part, a bright, fun, and adventurous puzzle/action game. Then you get to the Treasure vault and Nazi bunker levels, where the genre takes a trip down survival horror lane. Environments become dark, claustrophobic hallways, enemies are fast Nazi and Conquistador zombies that resemble some horrible Morlock/Gollum mashup and things get much harder. Up until 3/4 through the game, there has been no indication (aside from some light foreshadowing that you probably didn't put too much stock in) that the last act would take...that particular direction. Up to that point, ALL the enemies you've fought have been bread-and-butter humans, whom you engage in duck-and-cover gunfights inspired by the Gears of War style. The Descendants are the first enemy in the game who will barrel straight at you, and their claws will kill you quite quickly if you get hung up on something, even on Easy. You might not have even realized that Nate can run and fire without needing to stop and aim before this point, because with the calculated, behind-cover fight style of the rest of the game, you never really had hard need for it. Here, you do: the Descendants force you to shift your entire fight stye. The mood that the Nazi bunker evokes is similar to the "cut the power in the alien base" segments of the Metroid Prime Trilogy. The difference being that Samus is essentially wearing a tank and Nathan Drake goes down from a few slashes.

inFAMOUS had the side missions where you had to follow a Mad Bomber around without being seen until he put down his package, at which point you retrieved it. And you couldn't kill him, you just had to sneak around and hope you stayed in sight, because if you lost him you had ten seconds to find him, so sometimes you had to jump from the rooftops and try to stay undercover. Sometimes it was a real pleasure finally getting to blow him up at the end.

The demo for Brutal Legend depicted it as a third-person Hack and Slash action sort of game. Granted, everything in the demo is there, but it quickly devolves (or evolves, depending on your viewpoint) into a unit-commanding massive RTS game for the rest of it.

While NieR itself had what would be considered unusual additions (including Bullet Hell style bosses and enemies and the occasional bit of 2D platforming) the developers really went out of their way when they included a Text Adventure as part of the main plot.

Another World threw in a tank battle near the end of the game, where you had to guess the right sequence of buttons to win.

Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions has moments during boss battles where the action shifts to a first person perspective and the player must use the control sticks to control the way Spider-Man punches the boss as well as when to dodge the bosses' attacks.

Transformers: Fall of Cybertron is largely built around ranged combat, with each character having a signature special power and the ability to freely transform between robot and Cybertronian vehicle modes. When you finally get to play Grimlock you find he's built around melee combat, his signature power [i]is[/i] to transform into his T-Rex mode, and that he can only do so after building a 'Rage' meter through dishing out and receiving enough damage.

Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon has the Shrewd Possessor/Scornful Possessor boss battle in the Secret Mine. Up until now, the whole game has been a fairly slow paced survival horror/puzzle game with a certain style of ghost hunting mixed in. This boss on the other hand? Has you racing through a tunnel on a bomb shooting sleigh that's about to overheat and trying to blast the boss as it escapes from you down the mine shaft. It's... different. Said gameplay is never, ever used again in the entire game and the boss itself is seen as That One Boss due to the fact it's requiring people to figure out how to win a Rail Shooter mini game they had no real practice at. You can also supposedly choose to use motion controls for this section, if you really want to make an already annoying and not well implemented battle even more of a jarring shift.

Action Game

The original Devil May Cry was chastised by fans for throwing an unexpected 3D Shoot 'em Up level into the mix towards the end of the game, when you fight Mundus for the first time. Apparently, it stuck, seeing as it hasn't been repeated in any of the sequels.

There was also the escape by biplane through the tunnels after you defeat Mundus and get the hell out.

Devil May Cry 4 has not one, but two instances of an incredibly frustrating dice game. Dante just says fuck that and cuts the die in halfrather than bother doing it.

In between the free-roaming slaughter-fest stages, MadWorld had 2 levels where you had to ride down the highway on a motorbike beating the crap out of mooks on the way to the boss. In the second of those, you fight the boss while still on the bike.

Bayonetta has two missions like this, one on a bike, the other on a missile, the bike mission plays like your standard driving level (minus the scrappiness, as long as you keep on the right side of the road), the second one is a homage to Space Harrier.

Mafia, a story-driven action-adventure game, has a racecar section which must be won in order to advance. The whole section is loathed not only because of the gameplay change, but also because the game is set in the 1930's and therefore these cars aren't exactly the easiest to drive. Rubberband AI certainly doesn't help.

It also had a crate stacking sequence.

At least you got to crank down the difficulty for that, and it's really not that much different from all the high speed chases you routinely get into. The sniper mission, however, could really throw you for a loop. From massive shootouts with bullets flying everywhere in a small space to being able to take one, maybe two shots at a distant target with a very primitive sniper rifle with the view constantly shaking. That one could take a bunch of tries.

When you confront the Chief of Police in Stubbs the Zombie, he tries to make good on his threat to dance on Stubbs' grave... by challenging him to a dance-off, which takes the form of a Simon-esque rhythm minigame.

ROM Check Failis nothing but this. It randomly chooses a player character, targets/enemies, along with expected gameplay and behavior of both and mashes them together into 20 mind twisting levels

Gunstar Super Heroes for the Game Boy Advance did this as well. Most of the game is a beat-em-up with little variation, however a top-down shooting stage is suddenly put in on the 2nd Moon and on any difficulty higher than easy it essentially becomes a Luck-Based Mission and That One Level due to the ridiculous damage you take from projectiles. The original version on the Sega Genesis did this as well, placing a space shooter stage into the game towards the end which also carried into the sequel (albeit the space shooter was far easier).

The first LEGO Star Wars game had three vehicle levels (Podracing, gunships blowing stuff up on Geonosis, space battle over Coruscant) which were all partly different between each other and having gameplaywise nothing to do with the platforming/action part. It got better. Vehicle levels are now of the same standard and no longer have own rules for every level.

Stage 4 in Contra III, the first half of which is an auto scrolling ride on a jetbike, the second half of which has you hanging from missiles. These concepts carried over into most later games.

Shadows of the Empire does this so much, it's almost expected. You have a total of four different vehicle modes, including one as a gunner of a ship you later pilot in the last level. This is within ten levels.

Raid 2020, by the kings of unlicensed garbage, Sachen and Color Dreams, has an unexpected gameplay change to a boat shooter in the second level, and a space shooter in the fourth.

Asura's Wrath is a subversion, in that all the random gameplay changes through the game between several different styles is an intentional version of the principle behind the trope, in that it's meant to keep you on your toes. None of them feel taacked on either, like a lot of other examples of this trope.

El Shaddai, halfway through its 12 chapters,all of a sudden throws you onto a motorcycle chase sequence in the middle of an Action-Platformer game. Then it goes back to normal for the whole game.

Ms. 'Splosion Man has a drastic change when fighting the final boss — the climatic battle — ends up being a clone of Punch-Out!!, with Ms. Splosion Man trying to reach the top of the "Big Science" circuit.

Most of the levels in Trauma Center are standard surgery fare, where you have to treat diseases and wounds. Other operations involve fictional "super-diseases", but that still is surgery. However, there's at least one operation in each game that throws something completely different your way.

In Under the Knife and its Updated Re-releaseSecond Opinion, Derek must operate on a time bomb to disable it. The way to do so is completely different depending on the version, but it's definitely not standard surgery fare.

In level 5-7 of New Blood, called "Endgame", Markus, Valerie and Elena have to operate on a toy lock to escape their kidnappers' death trap. You must solve a puzzle by rotating panels on the lock in under two minutes, or else the heroes will drown.

In a similar fashion, chapter 6-6 of Under the Knife 2 (called "Improvising") has Derek and Angie operate on an electronic lock to escape their kidnappers. After removing the lid of a lock, you must remove its plugs while they are unlit. If you fuck up and touch a lit plug, the alarm goes off, resulting in an instant Game Over.

Adventure Game

The insertion of action elements (sometimes called "twitch scenes") into Adventure Games became increasingly common through the 1990s, as developers began to think that players would be attracted by them. The interactive movie game based on The X-Files turned briefly into a Rail Shooter, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey includes a number of combat scenes, etc. "Purist" adventure game enthusiasts decry the shift, firstly because they see it as a "dumbing down" of the genre, and secondly, because adventure game developers are, on the whole, not very good at writing action sequences. Or at least, not with an interface horribly unsuited to quick reactions. It's very very easy for those action sequences to become That One Sidequest.

Sierra was particularly infamous for this. Far too many of their games have action sequences, many of which poorly written and frustrating. Most of the time they were skippable in some way (except for the poker sequences, only possible through massive Save Scumming), but 100% Completion was forfeit. Conquests of the Longbow, for example, had an "arcade difficulty" slider in the options. Sierra developers were sadist like that.

Space Quest: Examples include the landspeeder/skimmer sequence in the first game and remake, Astro Chicken, Humongous MechaFinal Boss battle, and the Railroad shooter escape of III, and the burger-making minigame in IV.

So, so many Sierra games also have pointless gambling simulations shoehorned in. It worked kind of well in the vice-themed worlds of Leisure Suit Larry, but that was about it. This may be due to their dabbling in card game software with the Hoyle's Official Book of Games series in the late 80's.

The remake of Police Quest at least allowed you to skip the poker bit.

In the game Indigo Prophecy, you play the role of Lucas Kane, who was possessed and forced to commit murder. You play through the game mostly by interacting with a context sensitive environment and moving analog sticks to on-screen prompts to determine the outcome of movie-like cut-scenes. In two chapters of the game, you are forced to look back into events in Lucas' past as a child, living in a military base, where he must stealthily sneak past guards and spotlights. The game engine simply wasn't built to handle a Stealth-Based Mission like this, as the camera is terribly restrictive, and the player is forced to react to obscure prompts to find the single proper path, instead. The game also featured a brief, completely plot-irrelevant target range sequence.

Quantic Dream's previous game, The Nomad Soul, also had a significant Genre Shift towards first person shooting action, and more worrisome, towards beat'em up. None of the segments were particularly good, although some sequences were optional. Woe be to you if you reach the dramatically linear third act of the game without as many medikits as you can buy, however. No going back, and no purchasing more.

Adventure game Future Wars changes, right at the end, to a lengthy shooting sequence and an even lengthier run-through-the-maze sequence. It kind of felt like they didn't even bother to think up puzzles for the ending. At least the sequences are in line with the deadend-filled, rigidly linear and extremely punishing rest of the game.

Missing: Since January had a number of these, turning from a puzzle game to minigames. Some were good (minigolf, the cube game), other annoying (shooting parasites off of flowers, navigating a torch around holes) but all became tedious.

A few LucasArts adventure games have these. Curse of Monkey Island has ship combat, Full Throttle has motorbike fights, and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis has several, including fistfights, car chases and flying a hot air balloon. The game Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade also features fistfights and flying a biplane. Both fistfights and a biplane flight occur in The Last Crusade. In Fate of Atlantis, you are presented with three choices midgame, options are solo mode, cooperative, or action.

At the end of the second episode of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, the game switches from a click-and-point adventure to a turn-based strategy game. Also, the penultimate mini-game of the fifth episode is a Doom-eqsue first-person shooter. The final mini-game plays out like a boss in an old adventure game, complete with low-res textured graphics.

The first Dune game started off as an adventure game, then eventually turned into a strategy game for the remainder.

An example of gameplay change done right would be the arcade-style mashfests in Cyberflix's two games, Dust: A Tale Of The Wired West and Titanic: Adventure Out of Time. They're a complete 180 from the point-and-click gameplay of these adventure games, but not only are they pretty easy, there's no penalty for failing (other than missing out on one or two insignificant pieces of dialogue). The game will proceed exactly as if you'd succeeded.

Mission Critical is a fairly well-done adventure game about a man who wakes up alone on a spaceship in the middle of a crisis and must resolve several immediate issues as well as uncover the backstory. Halfway through the game, the player has to connect to the ship's tactical system, at which point it turns into a Real-Time Strategy (or Turn-Based Strategy, depending on your abuse of pauses), where the player has to destroy the opponent's capital ship(s) while defending his own. The end of the game does this as well.

The Maze Runner sequence in the Selenetic Age of Myst, which requires you to learn the sound cues from the Mechanical Age's Fortress Rotation Simulator to find the correct path. (Lessened somewhat by it being able to learn the cues in the maze, without going to Mechanical)

A couple of the Nancy Drew games throw in a chase scene at the conclusion, and a couple have rather tedious maze mini-games that are quite a departure from the series' usual brain-teaser style of Solve the Soup Cans. Several of the games also have third-person sequences, such as Nancy walking around a beach searching for treasure: quite the departure from the normal gameplay, which avoids showing her appearance at all costs.

Beat Em Up

God Hand has a jumping puzzle towards the end. Playing the game for 30 seconds will show you how inane this is.

The game also has a random Simon Says where you punch cannonballs back at the ship that's firing them halfway through world 3, it manages to be little more than a time-waster as it's not very hard at all. There's another one in world 5 where you have to fire a cannon (with really terrible missile drag) to shoot down an enemy ship, doing good at it is thankfully optional, but every hit kills an enemy so it's advised you learn to shoot it down to make it easier on yourself.

The Adventures of Bayou Billy was probably one of the first examples of this although it might not have been all that unexpected. The game was mostly a side-scrolling early Beat 'em Up in the vein of Double Dragon. There was still the odd driving levels and a Shoot 'em Up level where you had the option to use the Zapper light gun in place of the regular controller.

In Super Spy Hunter, the fourth stage is an autoscrolling aerial highway where you freefall several times, and the fifth stage is a boat sequence for the first half, and a jet plane Shoot 'em Up for the second half.

Driver had a mission where you had to deliver a crate of explosives in a pickup truck. Too many bumps, and it blows.

Edutainment Game

The Oregon Trail was largely a text-and-pictures wagon trail simulator, but included a hunting scene in which the player had to go out and shoot dinner in a manner reminiscent of the arcade shooter games of that era. The rafting down the Columbia River was necessary if you didn't have enough money for the Barlow Toll Road and made more difficult by the fact that the only practice you got came only after the requisite hour of play to get to the end.

In The Yukon Trail sequel rafting minigame became obligatory, but you could save the game before it. Also The Yukon Trail was more diverse, making the minigame less unexpected.

Snake's Final Smash in Brawl has you shooting grenades at the players like a third-person shooter.

Zero Suit Samus's Final Smash in the 3DS and Wii U instalments is similar to Snake's final smash, only instead of it being a third-person shooter, is actually a first-person shooter.

Donkey Kong's Final Smash changes his gameplay into a Rhythm Game. This is driven further in the 3DS and Wii U instalments where a rhythm bar appears over DK.

The Subspace Emissary, a sidescrolling action-adventure game contained within Brawl, may fall under this trope. Also, SSE itself ends with a Metroidvania segment, The Great Maze.

Soul Blade goes from 3D fighting game to first person during Mitsurugi's ending: You have to fight Teppou Hei wielding Tanegashima (a primitive firearm) from a first-person view.

Then again it's less of a fight and more of a "sidestep left twice in a rapid succession, mash forward, press any button, win".

Soul Calibur III has shades of this in its Chronicles of the Sword mode, which arranges the fights on an RTS-style map and implements RPG levelling, while individual encounters are resolved in the traditional 3D-fighter-with-weapons style. The combination of AI that really only knows how to Zerg Rush, bizarre arena effects, and the fact that the enemies will always be at least five levels higher than your main character can lead to moments of frustration.

The story mode gameplay of Godzilla Save The Earth has you unexpectedly have a rail shooter battle against Ebirah if you play as Godzilla 2000. And playing the story mode in hard mode as M.O.G.U.E.R.A has you fight a rail shooter battle against Spacegodzilla.

The Outfoxies, an arcade one-on-one multi-platform fighting game (like a darkly humorous Smash Bros.) has a gameplay change on the last level. Instead of another one-on-one duel, you start off outside a seemingly empty mansion. Unsurprisingly, the mansion is booby-trapped. Once you get past a deadly obstacle course, you reach the final showdown—your rocket launcher versus a combat helicopter.

PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale has this trope with many of the Level 3 Limit Breaks with the cast. The game turns into a First-Person Shooter with Radec, Sly Cooper, and Ratchet, for example. Some of the other Supers don't fall into specific categories, but also invoke this trope. Zeus turns the arena into his own personal whacking space while also making himself huge, Isaac turns the game into a pseudo Asteroids parody, Drake, Dante and Raiden alter the arena and/or enemies with the Sarcophagus of El Dorado, Devil Trigger, and boxes, respectively. It has quite bit of variety.

First Person Shooter

If often appears that every First Person Shooter is forced by law to have a Jet Set Willy interlude where you have to put up your guns and bounce around rising and falling platforms and moving conveyer belts.

In the last third of Marathon 2: Durandal, you're unexpectedly sent from assaulting the enemy's strongholds to missions set in allied bases, populated with friendly characters ("Bobs"). The stated goal was to defend the bases from invading aliens and to sniff out the evil clone Bobs, which explode on approach. More hidden text from the original game's BOB-heavy level, The Rose: "BOB jam? Apply grenades liberally!" Saving BOBs in this series is really more of a Self-Imposed Challenge.

TimeSplitters: Future Perfect - mid-level/mid-game, there's a good portion of the level dedicated to solving a puzzle [similar to Slime Tube or whatever it was called] to get Cortez past security doors.

The part when suddenly the main character must sneak around an Imperial base without being seen, or the Stormtroopers will rush and hit an alarm button and summon a garrison of Stormtroopers, who will arrest you. This would be at least understandable in the early levels when you're without Force powers (or have very weak versions), but it comes late in the game when you're an unstoppable Jedi of Death and a garrison of Stormtroopers is about as threatening as a garrison of kittens. And during the vehicle sequences.

The stealth mission can be made more like the rest of the game if you can get to the alarm button before any troopers can, since they need to physically hit the button to actually catch you - it's pretty hard for them to do so when said unstoppable Jedi of Death is standing right between them and it, saber in hand and active.

Jedi Academy makes liberal use of these. It has a variation on the No-Gear Level in which the player is captured and must break out, obtaining weapons as they go. Another level places the character at the controls of a speeder bike. One level is essentially a puzzle level with no enemies to fight. Others have unique enemies found nowhere else in the game, including a couple areas where a creature is your main opponent and another that's basically a game of cat-and-mouse with Boba Fett.

The game has two of these. "All Ghillied Up" is a stealth-basedSniping Mission, and "Death from Above" puts you in the gunner's seat of an AC-130 gunship. There's much to be said, after being in missions where you're outgunned and outnumbered, to be in a mission where it's the enemy and their AKs versus you and your 105mm howitzer, 40mm rapid-fire cannon, and electric minigun. "All Ghillied Up" is a particularly masterful example of a well-done Unexpected Gameplay Change; the first hint that it's going to be mostly stealthy is when as the game fades into view of an empty field of grass, your companion is only revealed when a piece of the scenery gets up and creeps forward.

World At War has its own Gameplay Change in the form of "Black Cats", in which the focus shifts from taking on the Japanese/Germans on the ground to shooting down Zeroes over the Pacific from the gun turrets of a Catalina flying boat.

This trope has been used since the beginning of the series. The first game has two levels where you drive a T-34 tank through a fortified German city. 2 and World at War followed suit, putting you in respectively a Crusader tank fighting enemy armor in the Libyan desert and another T-34 rampaging through Seelow Heights.

The first game's expansion pack, United Offensive, has a level where you play as the gunner of a B-17 bomber, defending your plane from a ludicrously large number of German fighters.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 featured optional (although highly recommended to complete) side missions that add some RTS game mechanics or directly control one of the units deployed to become something akin of a tactical shooter. It's just too bad your squadmates are very dumb.

In Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, the final two missions are this. At the beginning of Captured, your prosthetic left arm is destroyed and you are forced to play through the level with one arm, one gun, and no reserve ammunition. Mitchell is forced to repeatedly scavenge new weapons from the enemies he kills. The end of that level and most of the next level take a turn into Mech Shooter territory when you hijack an enemy AST.

At the end of Crysis, which has been almost entirely on-foot first-person shooter action with minor, optional car usage, a level takes place with the player driving a VTOL fighter craft, which handles like a pregnant cow, and which you have to engage in dogfights with.

You were given a prep course for that when you had to drive an alleged tank which has lousy traction, can't push through a picket fence, has no weapons stabilization what-so-ever, and doesn't even let you use the binoculars you have while walking around.

The Quantum of Solace video game had an unexpected setting change. Just after the player completes the sinkhole level, Bond has a flashback. It's the opening scene of Casino Royale. Okay, it's a Character DevelopmentFlash Back-wait, where'd the cinematic letterboxing go? This was not really mentioned at all in the game promotions.

The main problem is that, since Casino Royale didn't get its own game adaptation, the Quantum of Solace one mashed the two together - and the result is a game where, after four levels adapted from the film it is named after, the next fifteen of sixteen are all Casino Royale.

Bond games have some unexpected gameplay changes as a rule. It's not uncommon for a first/third-person shooter Bond to have stealth, driving, and rail-shooting segments.

The Maw, Outskirts, and Halo driving sequences, and the aerial battles on "Two Betrayals", "The Arbiter", "The Great Journey",and "The Covenant". Also, the Arbiter mission involves stealth to some degree.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein involves a particularly annoying sequence early on in the game where the player is forced to sneak through a level, and if the player is seen, they usually get a game over almost instantly because an alarm is sounded (only in rare cases can the player get away with killing the enemy and not having another turn on the alarm). The reason for the annoyance lies in the RTCW enemy sight and hearing range, which is absurdly large, and makes sense for an FPS game, but for stealth it turns the entire level into a Scrappy Level. And there's a glitch that can render the level Unwinnable in some versions. If you shoot out the last alarm, the truck driver will be alerted, although unable to sound the alarm, and you'll be unable to exit.

The Halloween update added an MMORPG-style raid boss in the form of the Headless Horseless Horsemann: ridiculously difficult to kill and gives an achievement and a rare drop to the person who lands the finishing blow.

Team Fortress 2 has many unofficial modes made by fans of the game. First, you might be in a Vs. Saxton Hale game, where it's your team against the super-manly CEO of Mann Co., and then FortWars, where your team builds walls out of junk and then plays "keep-away" with the intelligence, either protecting it or killing the other team, and then it's off to PropHunt, where one team has been transformed into various bits of scenery (a haystack, a barrel, a wooden cow, etc.) while the other team must find them. The hunted can't use any sort of weapon, but the hunters lose health every time they fire their weapons, to prevent spamming.

More generally, at some point Team Fortress 2 stopped being an FPS and became a hat simulator with FPS elements.

Scream Fortress 2014 added a Hallowe'en map called Carnival of Carnage, where both teams end up in bumper cars and with a new objective once the map's main objective has been completed by one team or another. The bumper car objectives are collecting rubber ducks or avoidig falling platforms, or trying to play 'car football with them. Alternatively, a team can win any of these objectives by knocking the enemy team off the bumper car area. This new addition also quickly spawned a new mod that basically turns the game into Mario Kart''!

Half-Life 2 had driving, boating and crane sequences to break up the shooting, as well as a Survival Horror chapter with sparse ammunition.

Riding the Styracosaurus in Turok 2's second stage, and the infamous pterosaur flying levels in Evolution.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution had the Panchaea level. Whereas in the rest of the game you've been fighting organized soldiers and using cover, here you're faced with hordes of fast pseudo-zombies who use melee, similar to the Uncharted example. While the devs (and many players) were somewhat dissappointed with the end result, they claim that it was their intention to introduce a sudden gameplay change.

The River Extraction mission in Perfect Dark Zero has a Halo style vehicle combat sublevel where you pilot a hovercraft along the river and Jack mans the gunner seat. Later, in Jungle Storm, you get to fly the Jetpac you saw earlier in the game.

Pilotwings is mostly a simple game about training excercises on various kinds of aircraft. But halfway through, and again at the end, it suddenly turns into an action game where you have to avoid antiaircraft fire in a helicopter to rescue your instructors. And again in the final stage, except that you're saving a government agent. What make this especially jarring is that you don't get any retry chance if you're shot down; it goes immediately to the Game Over screen...the implication being that you died.

The Final Boss, in the game's hard-to-reach fifth ending, is not fought in the same way that other major enemies have been, Hack and Slash for ground enemies and Flight Sim for aerial enemies. The game orients with the dragon flying a circle around the boss as it emits white and black colored circles. The player has to emit a white circle back for a white circle and so on with black circles, turning the game into a simplified version of Simon. That said, the patterns emitted by the Final Boss are soul-crushingly difficult to replicate at times.

There's a similarly frustrating battle in the sequel: On the path to Ending B (and the final ending), the protagonist Nowe is forced to fight the Bone Casket/Seed of Resurrection where Nowe was created. Surrounding the structure are several colored crystals (?). The "boss" only has two abilities—it glows with a colored light, and a shockwave. However, touching the boss while it's glowing is an instant kill. The shockwave is also instant death. The only way to damage the boss is to use the downward strike, and then hide behind the crystal that matches the color the boss is glowing. And then you only have a split second to jump off (or summon Legna and fly off) before the boss starts glowing again. The timing of your attack and the boss's color pattern can be very hard to gauge, and if you die you have to start all over again until you win.

The third game takes it Up to Eleven with a redux of the first game's final boss, this time as a fleshed out rhythm game segment with multiple parts, confusing patterns and camera angles actively working against you. The song is about seven minutes long and the last note must be guessed because the screen has already turned pitch black. One wrong button input and it's back to square one. No wonder it became the series' That One Boss overnight.

No More Heroes intersperses hack-and-slash mayhem with open sandbox city exploration, item collection, a Galaga-esque space shooter sequence, public services such as cleaning up the park or mowing lawns, hitting a baseball through a row of enemies, and avoiding obstacles on a highway chase.

Miscellaneous Games

The rougelike Caves Of Qud has an exceedingly frustrating one early in. While the game is normally an open world survival RPG, it has some rather frustrating elements which come into play in the fourth quest. Upon arriving in the factory you were sent to, you jump down onto a conveyer belt with enough Benevolent Archetecture to make Half-Life proud, the walls are mostly steam vents which shoot streams of flame that will instantly kill most characters of the appropriate level to survive in the surrounding jungle, every other turn, there are a few eel infested pools of acid that you can use to put yourself out on the way down, and at the bottom, there is a deceivingly hard Boss Battle with a partially randomly generated boss whose name will somehow include the word "Cloaca". If it is beaten with a melee weapon, which it most likely will due to the penetration scores of the highest level long gun/bow being just barely too low to make at least 25% of its shots on the target, you will contract a disease which makes simple things such as eating and drinking cause you to bleed profusely, until your tongue falls out. During your time infected with the disease, and in the aftermath of being tongueless you will be unable to speak, and trading will be nigh impossible. If you have regeneration, your tongue will grow back, and immediately start to rot and bleed again. If you have hemophilia, you will die trying to eat without at a minimum, 5 bandages to stop the bleeding. If you have mutations both, the game is Unwinnable if you cannot make the cure, which it is possible for it to be impossible to make, by requiring that you make a mixture that requires more parts of one ingredient than is possible to mix in game! Suddenly, it has become a survival game where there are no options to survive.

Although Action 52 is itself a wild mishmash of games and genres, a couple of its games do this. The third level of "Ninja Assault" is a frustrating log-jumping level in the midst of beat-'em-up levels, and "Bubblegum Rosie" has an even more frustrating driving stage in between the first and third platformer levels. Cheetahmen starts out as an isometric beat-em-up similar to the first level of Battletoads, but is a platformer for the rest of the game.

Interactive fiction game Heavy Rain goes from tense, heart-stopping stealth and action hybrids to... playing on a construction site as a small child completely new to the plotline. Admittedly, this kid turns out to be VERY important in the big scheme of things.

Not so much Unexpected Gameplay Change and more like Unexpected Gameplay period but the last episode of Umineko no Naku Koro ni contains some puzzles you have to answer to get bonus scenes and a choice which decides which of the Alternate Endings you get, its not much, but even this minuscule bit of gameplay was very unexpected for a series that for 7 episodes was a straight visual novel with absolutely no interaction whatsoever.

Sin and Punishment: Successor of the Skies is a pretty standard rail shooter, up until the last stage of the last boss of Chapter 6 where it suddenly shifts to a side on Street Fighter like fighting game.

Most of Zap Dramatic's games are about negotiating with others, but the very end of Sir Basil Pike Public School turns into a Rhythm Game.

While the majority of quests in World of Warcraft consist out of killing stuff, there are some quests that mix things up, such as flying on a fixed path to drop bombs or a few minigames connected to the various ingame holidays like juggling a torch.

Wrath of The Lich King added a new vehicle mechanic and a lot of opportunities to use it. Most of them include you mounting on something that amounts to a giant death machine and laying waste to hordes of enemies. These are undoubtfully awesome. Most of the rest have you take on something that's even stronger. These are fun if you like the change and are hated by the ones who find it hard, or by players who lack the coordination required.

A game that changes from 2D movement to 3D, at a boss fight that depends on precise positioning with no way to tell how far away, up or down you were, but retaining the poor camera controls. The Oculus is so bad they had to add a bribe (a new mount) to it to get people to stop abandoning groups as soon as it came up. This was intended as practice for an even worse raid dungeon with the same mechanic. The bugs that still run rampant, almost a year after release, such as things aggroing to you from far outside their normal range, that can only be fought on dragonback, but since you're in combat you can't mount to fight it, don't help either.

When people enter the Upper Spire of Icecrown Citadels they are confronted with a hallway where jets of cold burst from the walls, transforming the game briefly into a timing based obstacle course. Despite being so incredibly easy than any platformer would burst out laughing on being told they presented a challenge, these have been known to kill the same person multiple times, as they die, get brought back to life, then run right back into the icy jets. Part of this stems from the first of said jets being five feet in front of where you zone in, so those continuing to hold forward through the brief loading screen out of habit are quick to be instagibbed. These kinds of challenges are located in several dungeons and raids and are collectively known as "Frogger".

The more well-known version of Frogger is found in Naxxramas. After killing Patchwerk in the Abomination Quarter, to proceed through the raid, you need to avoid several rows of green slimes that move in one direction; very similar to the game "Frogger". This was known for killing more raid members than the actual boss fight preceding it. Similarly, several elevators (most notably, the one in Serpentshrine Caverns) are known as "the elevator boss", since the elevator is an open platform on a timer, and players often attempt to board the elevator just as it leaves...and the elevator either moves faster than gravity, or very close to gravity's acceleration, meaning that the players who weren't lucky enough to be on the elevator end up cratering far below (unless they have a slow fall ability).

Heroic Deadmines in Cataclysm take this up to eleven, under the effect of the true final boss' mind-altering nightmare poison, you hallucinate various nightmares involving the other four bosses, challenge one and three include, in order, running down a narrow ramp (the sides are flooded with fire) while avoiding icicles that fall from the ceiling and will one-shot you, the third challenge can best be described as a Super Mario Bros. reference involving fire bars, but electricity instead of fire.

Peacebloom vs. Ghouls is essentially a tower defense game disguised as a quest chain, using a garden full of magical plants to defend a farm against marauding undead. Sound familiar? It should. The minigame is a deliberate tribute to PvZ with the ultimate prize being a vanity pet modeled after one of the flowers from the source.

In Final Fantasy XI, Parradamo Tor is a giant monument to this trope. If you want to complete the Chains of Promathia mission series or have a fight in Boneyard Gully, you're forced to climb it, an activity that more than anything resembles a cross between maze-crawling and tightrope-walking.

City of Heroes is mostly a classic MMORPG, but one phase during the Behavioral Adjustment Facility trial bears more than a passing resemblance to a Tower Defense game.

Aura Kingdom Throughout the game, you will occasionally play as NPCs on Stealth mission-like quests to deliver items into certain locations without being spotted. If you are spotted, then you will have to try again. You may also have to kidnap some mobs and bring them in for bounty or as an item to continue quests.

Pinball

Possibly one of the most extreme changes, Baby Pac-Man alternated play between the video game and the pinball game.

Sega's Star Wars Trilogy has the player thaw Han Solo out of carbonite by answering Star Wars trivia questions.

Loading the center cannon in Big Guns activated a bagatelle mini-game in the backbox, giving players a chance to earn an extra ball.

The unreleased Golden Cue was all about unexpectedly changing the conventional rules of Pinball — instead of simply playing indefinitely for a high score, players had to complete six goals, then shoot the Corner Pocket to collect a countdown bonus and end the game. Expert players were expected to play faster and collect a bigger bonus.

Sharkey's Shootout has players competing against various opponents in 8-ball or 9-ball billiards... except for the final Wizard Mode against Jeanette Lee, which features a four-ball multiball called "The Web".

In Bally/Midway's Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man Pinball, players periodically stop the pinball game to play a primitive maze game, using the flipper buttons to move Pac-Man (a flashing yellow light) around a grid. It's as exciting as it sounds.

Platform Game

Modern platforming games such as Sly Cooper and Ratchet & Clank often have you enter races in order to gain items or otherwise progress in the game.

The Sly Cooper games have also thrown in vehicular combat, Robotron 2084-esque shooting segments, and rhythm-based sequences as well. Some fans of the stealth-focusedfirst game have complained that this wrecks the point of the series.

Most will agree the rhythm battle with Mz. Ruby is among the best boss battles in the series.

The dreaded Underwater Propulsion Vehicle sequences on the Down the Drain level Lud's Gate.

Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation opens with a sixteen years-old, defenseless Lara. It's a tutorial segment, so no big deal... until Tomb Raider: Chronicles, where a lengthy segment with Young Lara is tossed in the middle of the game. Not an unwelcome variation for a game that had become so formulaic by then, but still unexpected and potentially troubling.

The Jak and Daxter series is rife with these, containing everything from races to skateboarding to stealth to rail-based shooters. The games also go from the bright and happy, fantasy-based Jak and Daxter, to the darker, more sci-fi with GTA mixed-in feel of Jak II. And one of the most difficult levels of all in this series is easily a very early mission in Jak II involving be chased by a tank from its perspective. Another level is the rail-based shooter level where you have to destroy the tanker, particularly on Hero Mode, where the number of guards and their increased resistance to damage makes it near impossible. That level makes every other, including the final boss, look easy.

Kid Icarus, a classic NES platform game, unexpectedly becomes a side-scrolling shoot-'em-up in the last level. Which Uprising would end up adopting as the standard gameplay type. Even then, the game had a few examples of this trope such as:

Chapter 18, which becomes a Kingdom Hearts style melee-focused Beat 'em Up due to you playing as Magnus. It also flips the usual Air Battle - > Ground Battle formula.

Chapter 19, which throws an unexpected High Speed Battle at you for the boss fight, which annoyingly doesn't really explain the controls to you until it's probably too late.

The air portion of Chapter 20, which has you riding the Lightning Chariot uses the same shooting mechanics as normal, but plays like a top-down Bullet Hell game.

And Chapter 22, while previous stages have been roughly 50% Air, 50% Ground Battle, this stage is all Air until the boss.

Bucky OHare, a very good but rather obscure NES platformer, also becomes a (very good) side-scrolling shoot-'em-up in the last level.

Metroid Zero Mission features a Stealth-Based Mission in which Samus loses the standard power suit and must navigate through an enemy-infested fortress armed only with a weak, slow-charging stun pistol.

Super Mario Galaxy loves to shift from 3D gameplay to 2D gameplay, but the opening level of Super Mario Galaxy 2 takes the cake — it starts on a strict 2D plane, then becomes 2.5-D (as in that Mario can roam freely around the ground, yet the game is still in a sidescrolling state), and finally fully 3D by the time Mario reaches the castle.

Super Mario Land, while mostly a standard Mario game, has side-scrolling shooter levels for 2-3 and 4-3, including the final boss.

Star Fox Adventures has it a bit backwards—while the Star Fox series is a shooter, Adventures was a Zelda-esque game, so when the game threw in "classic-style" shooting elements including the final boss, it felt a bit weird. One can attribute this to its origins as Dinosaur Planet, a game that had nothing to do with Star Fox.

Played straight with the Aquas submarine level in Star Fox 64, and the two tank levels. The difference is in the absent crosshair. It appears briefly when one does a Charged shot, but because all charged shots are auto targeting the enemies, it only purpose is to show which enemy is going down when you release the A Button. In other words, aiming is more difficult.

Sonic Adventure added a number of different genres (one for each character) to the Sonic the Hedgehog series that had been fast paced platformers. For example: Tails' stages involve racing against Sonic or Eggman, Knuckles had to find emerald shards in non-linear stages, Amy was more slow-paced platforming with the addition of an implacable robot, E-102 Gamma was a mix of platforming and Panzer Dragoon where it had to shoot enemies to increase the stage's time limit, and Big's stages were Fishing Minigames. The Kart stages in both Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2 are even more egregious.

Sonic Unleashed introduces a werewolf-like transformation for Sonic, which is slower than Sonic and consists of a lot of bashing.

The day stages were this as well. Up to this point, the games had all used the Adventure formula, which began as somewhat the Classics in 3d, from a certain point of view: Running and jumping, attacking enemies and landing on platforms, the only major changes being the homing attack, being faster paced, more story driven and less emphasis on rolling, Sonic's original gimmick. When Unleashed came around, this all changed and it became more speed orientated, and since Unleashed fans have officially declared the return of Sonic the Hedgehog.

And then there were the Tornado Defense and Gaia Colossus stages.

Sonic 3D Blast involves killing badniks and freeing flickies...until Panic Puppet Zone. In Act 1, they are in pods instead. In Act 2, there aren't any flickies at all as the goal is to get to the top of the level.

I Wanna Be the Guy does this twice in the Hall of Former The Guys. In Sinistar's room, opening the way forward requires playing a game of Break-Out, and in the room after it, you mount the Vic Viper for a brief shooting segment.

In Kirby Super Star, Milky Way Wishes interjects the usual Kirby gameplay with a shmup section. Most Kirby games end with an Unexpected Gameplay Change. Additionally, The Great Cave Offensive tries to tinker the series' linear-platforming gameplay into something more like a Metroidvania, but it doesn't quite make it. There's also the RPG boss, but that's really more of a joke.

Super Star Wars: Return of the Jedi ends with a really irritating, escape sequence involving dodging obstructions. It quickly become ridiculously fast, turning into an almost Battletoads level sequence.

The Death Star trench run in the first SSW game was also a big ugly unexpected gameplay change.

Donkey Kong: King of Swing had a level in the last world that had no pegs at all, consists of only one area, and revolves flying around a rocket barrel. The final battle against King K. Rool is really just two Jungle Jam events — a race and a battle — complete with the "ready, go!" beginning.

Donkey Kong 64 has two different arcade machines: one for the original Donkey Kong and one for Rare's Jetpac. They seem at first to be amusing distractions, until you get to the final door in the final level and find that it's embedded with Nintendo and Rare icons; you have to beat the original Donkey Kong (the easy mode for the Golden Banana and the hard mode for the Nintendo icon) and score enough points in Jetpac just to reach the final boss. For many uncoordinated children who hadn't grown up with those games, this is a bit of a brick wall.

Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble has a level, Krack-Shot Kroc, where an offscreen villain is continuously trying to shoot you, with a big crosshair showing where his next shot will go. An Unexpected Gameplay Change comes in one of the bonus areas of this level, where you control the offscreen cannon and must kill all enemies in the bonus area. The boss of the same world is a snowball fight that borrows its mechanics from a minigame two levels world before.

Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon included a lot of interesting gameplay changes as optional side missions, including a two-part FPS sequence where you take control of an ape with a laser gun. As a fun homage, the two parts of this sequence were titled "You're Doomed!" and "You're still Doomed!" The mid to late Spyro games (Spyro 2 and the Gamecube games) are guilty of this too. In Enter the Dragonfly there are minigames where Spyro gets to pilot fighter planes and tanks.

N64 Platform GameRocket: Robot on Wheels featured several "vehicles," which could be ridden around the worlds; this itself didn't necessarily institute a gameplay change, but it frequently led to "racing" segments (or Pass Through the Rings). Also, one section of the game includes a miniature roller coaster-building sim. It's not quite a mini-game, but it's still... unusual.

The final level of the first game is not a platform stage like the others, but a TV-style quiz show.

Banjo-Tooie features several "Breegull Blaster" segments, where the game's usual platforming action strays and the game becomes a first-person shooter with Kazooie as the gun. Not only do you fight a boss this way, but all of the maps from these modes are included in the multiplayer mode as "shootouts." Both the maps and the control scheme replicate those from Rare's FPS Goldeneye.

Rare struck it backwards again with Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, which strayed from the series' typical platforming to be a user-generated vehicle game with some platforming in the Hub Level.

Hammerin' Hero is a side-scrolling 2˝D platformer for the first 11 stages, and then the last level turns into a free-scrolling R-Type clone. Even the Big Bad (who you fight in the second-to-last stage) fights you in a spaceship which looks a lot like the R-9 Arrowhead, complete with Force Bit.

Mischief Makers, a side-scrolling platformer, has one level which consists of a series of Olympic-style events, with gameplay not unlike that of Track And Field. Furthermore, one of the events in this series is an Unexpected Gameplay Change in itself: amidst a bunch of athletic events is a math competition. Another event in that stage that stands out is the one where you have to catch balls in a pot while making sure none belonging to the other team gets in.

Toy Story, for the most part a pretty standard 2D licensed platformer, had that one level "Really Inside The Claw Machine" which was played from a DOOM style first person perspective, and the final level was a race against time where you were controlling the remote controlled car with a bird's eye view.

2. Hyper mode. Achieved by picking up 10 orbs. All things except trolls turn to cake. Each cake is worth 1000 points, twice as much as an orb.

3. Wizards. In the center of each planet is a wizard with two familars and 1-5 TVs. Take all the TVs and you can then attack the wizard directly. The two familiars are shooting bullets during this time, and the familiars can only be eaten in hyper mode.

4. Satellites. In between planets, satellites will appear and lay mines to block your path.

In Dynamite Headdy the normal (though not very normal) platforming is replaced with a flying shoot'em up for one level.

Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones has two chariot races. Two thoroughly infuriating chariot races. Otherwise, the game was an excellent balance of platforming and combat.

Particularly memorable in the Game BoyMega Man V, where you begin by dodging indestructible asteroids, then taking on Mooks with the Breath Weapon Rush is now equipped with, then dodging lasers on the way to fight the Wily Star.

The Lion King was a side-view platformer except in the wildebeest stampede level, which had Simba racing towards the camera.

Conkers Bad Fur Day starts off as a normal platformer but soon throws in gameplay changes in the levels as the story progresses: riding dinosaurs, shooting zombies, and lava surfing, just to name a few.

In The Adventure Of Little Ralph, an obscure Japanese platformer for the original PlayStation, the hero, Ralph, was originally a man, but the main villain turned him into a boy. Ralph spends almost the entire game like this, but just prior to the game's midboss fight (halfway through the stages) Ralph randomly turns into a man again. Then, he fights the villain in a traditional fighting-game style (complete with health bars) until the villain is defeated. Then Ralph randomly turns back into a boy again. However, past the second time this happens, it is no longer unexpected, as all of the boss battles after the midboss are played as in a fighting game.

Ninth Rock is largely a platform game with minor stealth elements. One of the latter challenges involves using a crane to move crates to block the vision of guards, and the final task is a spherical maze which must be manipulated to collect all the energy orbs and get them inside.

Yosu no Tera has a section where Mario has to use the P-Balloon in order to navigate the pseudo-SHUMP section, and Yosu no Tera 2 does the same thing to Luigi in Something Else.

Fantoma Mura, Yurei no Jinja, and This is Something in Something Else also have the same gimmick.

Puzzle Game

Parodied in Portal when GLaDOS "accidentally" sends you to a battle-droid training chamber because the usual testing area is being repaired. (Given that the Enrichment Center is deserted, this is almost certainly a half-truth at best.) Instead of figuring out how to get around strange logic puzzles, you need to use your skills to deactivate the security drones.

Soon after this point the whole game begins to subtly genre shift from a simple, plot-less puzzle platformer to a more straight-up platformer with puzzle elements added in, with a storyline resembling survival horror more than anything else.

The 'straight-up platformer with puzzle elements added in' is, essentially, just making the story part of the puzzles.

Real Time Strategy

Starcraft: Ghost was supposed to feature, near the end of the game, you going around in a tank and blowing the crap out of everyone, after a game of sneaking around.

The Orc campaign in Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne suddenly turns out to be a full-on RPG, rather than the strategy + slight RPG mix of the previous seven campaigns. Though the Orc campaign isn't part of the main story (as it's unlocked from the start) so it's not very sudden.

What's more sudden is the bonus tower defense level in the alliance campaign.

Every Tiberian/Red Alert Command & Conquer game has at least one campaign mission that is more real-time tactical than real-time strategy. The player will control a small (1-4) number of elite commando units and have to use a combination of tactics, stealth, and scripted events to outmaneuver a militarily superior foe. The original Red Alert was particularly fond of these, often setting them inside missile silos or bombed-out towns in central Europe.

The otherwise Pikminesque core gameplay in Little Kings Story is traded for a Vertical Scrolling... Avoider? before going back to the original gameplay for the final boss sequence. Some units escape each time you take damage, so the better you do here, the more units you have to work with against them.

Rhythm Game

The boss songs in Guitar Hero 3, where you essentially were buffeted by random status effects and had to use your own random status effects to try and make the other guy fail.

Despite all the flack Guitar Battle has gotten, it was actually a pretty cool concept, and more in tune with the "beat the best to be the best" theme of the game than simply playing songs. The problem was that you HAD to win. You would not get another song or venue, ever, until you won the battle. Thankfully, Neversoft realized that this was a lousy idea and put only a couple of token duels in World Tour before eliminating them as a requirement for good.

In Mass Effect 2 when you suddenly have to play as Joker, your pilot with brittle bones disease who can't fight or even run. The level is practically a walk-in cutscene as all you can do is walk slowly along the one safe path while the rest of the crew gets abducted around you. Straying from the safe path will get you instantly killed by enemies that you would normally squash like a bug, it has a very survival/horror feel to it.

In possibly the earliest example of the trope, the second* strictly speaking, the first called Ultima, its predecessor was named Akalabeth installment of Ultima, a turn-based high fantasy RPG, required the player to buy a spaceship, engage in real-time one-on-one space combat, and become a "Space Ace" in order to finish the game. And you thought that astronaut on the cover was just bad art...

Final Fantasy VI had the opera scene. One had to remember a couple melodramatic (but hey, it's opera after all) lines from an opera; any mistake would end the scene and require it to be restarted. Then again, this is considered one of the best scenes in the game.

Final Fantasy VIII and IX both contain card games. It can be completely ignored in VIII if you choose, but it is a good way to get many rare items and spells. There is one short portion of IX that requires you to play, but you only have to win a few battles. However, you miss out on a nifty item if you don't win all the card battles. Besides that, the only reason to play the game in IX is to... get all the cards.

VIII also features a... fistfight between the main character and a mook with a jetpack. Fortunately, if you failed you were allowed to restart at the start of the sequence and choose to tone down the enemy's health.

There was also a moment where a character who primarily uses a gun as a weapon had to fight a dragon using a sword that used the same "fighting" system as this fistfight battle.

IX also features Chocobo Hot and Cold where you use a chocobo to dig around in a forest (and a few other areas) to get items. You also find treasure maps that guide you to treasures spread around the world that you can dig up with your chocobo. This is entirely optional, but you get some of the best weapons and armor in the game from it, sometimes much sooner than you should.

Final Fantasy games from V to IX all feature sections where you have to race through an area with a timer.

They've been carried over and made even more complicated in Pokemon Diamond and Pearl. If you want to master them, you may have to actually train Pokemon specifically for contests, giving them different moves than battle-concentrated Pokemon, and manipulating their natures to fit the contest you want.

A "Poffin-making" game consisting of making circles with the stylus, adjusting the speed and direction in reaction to signals on the screen. The main purpose of this is to make your 'mons perform better in one phase of the contests.

An "underground" game allowing you to encounter other players, and set harmless "traps" for them. There's also a mini-game within the mini-game that's somewhat similar to Battleship. Both of these parts are encouraged, to achieve 100% completion.

In Pokemon Ranger: Guardian Signs, there are levels where you have to chase someone underwater by diving down and levels where you have to dodge swarms of energy bullets.

The Gummi Ship mini-games in Kingdom Hearts, where you go from an Adventure Game to piloting a Star Fox-esque spaceship against waves of enemies. In Kingdom Hearts II, the Atlantica world throws you into a sort of Rhythm Game; this was possibly in response to the original Atlantica, which stayed in-genre but added a badly-implemented third dimension. Finally, one of your Summons allows you to temporarily switch to "FPS Mode".

One part of the final boss fight also notably played it like a rail shooter rather than the game's typical fighting system.

Kingdom Hearts Re: coded is, for the most part, an RPG with a battle system closest to Birth by Sleep, but every level ends with something different. Olympus, for instance, turns into a turn-based RPG (appropriate, since Cloud is there).

Birth By Sleep. Disney Town. You have three minigames, in each character's story you have to do one of them. They are: Kart Racing, a Rhythm game and this volleyball...thing. And you HAVE to do the one in your storyline. And you can't just get a 'decent' score on the rhythm game, it has to be a high one.

Blitzball in Final Fantasy X. Also features a lightning-dodging minigame, a butterfly-catching minigame, a Cactuar-version of red light green light, and two chocobo-racing minigames. All of these (including Blitzball, where you must win the tournament, requiring the playing of many, many games) are compulsory for getting the ultimate weapons.

Super Mario RPG has many minigames, which themselves have UGCs; one minigame has you sliding down a waterfall in one part and riding barrels down a river in the next, and another has you riding in a mine cart, alternating between Mode 7 sequences and Minecart Madness.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic contained mandatory (though pathetically easy) arcade sequences where the player had to take down Sith fighters with a ball turret, as well as Random Encounters with Sith fighters when flying between planets. A more annoying mandatory sequence involving swoop bikes was preceded by a long, unskippable cutscene, forcing the player to repeat it over and over in case of defeat during the race. The sequel contains no random encounters, and the plot-driven arcade sequences are no longer mandatory.

Rather bizarrely, the sequel had a brief sequence with you manning one of the Ebon Hawk's guns against a horde of Sith troopers. Even more strangely, while there was no reward for killing them with the turret, letting them board the ship and then beating them hand-to-hand was worth a healthy chunk of XP.

The NPCs in Breath of Fire IV force Ryu to perform so many mini-game based quests, that players may feel justified in joining Fou-Lu to blow them all up in the Bad Ending.

Nearly every X game has at least one auto scrolling hoverbike level since Mega Man X4. X8 has two of them.

Quite painful in Xenogears when you enter into a gear combat tournament. This brings in a rather simplistic Street Fighter style combat system, despite the fact that you're not actually doing anything different than when you are usually fighting in your gears (which is standard RPG style).

Baten Kaitos Origins has a brief stealth segment, as well as a couple of scenes where you have to collect evidence to solve a bombing.

And its predecessor, Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean has a Block Puzzle. A really diabolical Block Puzzle, thanks to the perspective not quite lining up with the basic directions, meaning half the time you'll be straining up against the block and it won't be moving. There's also the Trail of Souls, an Unexpected Shmup Level made to troll those who are going for 100% Completion, and the Ice Goddess and Wizard Shadow battles, both of which seem to think that regular fights in Eternal Wings aren't quite luck-based enough.

The World Ends with You has Tin Pin/Marble Slash, which is a kind of mini game where you have to knock other people's pins off a platform using your own pin. Thankfully, you only have to play it once, against a very easy opponent, and can stack the odds in your favor six pins to two.

And then this trope gets pushed much further in the omake bonus game Another Day, which is all about Tin Pin Slammer and has a complete shift in tone with hilarious results. It's like Square-Enix wrote their own crack fan fic.

Hellgate: London has one mission in which you control a group of fighters which turns the game into a (really bad) RTS. This section is also incredibly much harder than the rest and is generally beaten by triggering a bug to avoid losing, then chain airstriking the boss for 20 minutes.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance makes you play some Pitfall with the character who activated the machine as the game character. This can be pretty annoying when characters that can usually fly or teleport keep falling into pits.

And also an instance of Breakout where one of your characters actually pushes the paddle left and right and plays the game, while the others should try to avoid getting hit by the ball.

Space Rangers 2 starts off by being a RPG-esque space arcade/sim with economic elements. Then there's the RTS sections with Humongous Mecha, which you also can control directly in third person view. Then there's the text-based missions which range from logic puzzles, to math excercises, to "choose your own adventure" style sequences. And then there's the straightforward arcade "fly around and shoot everything" sequences inside wormholes.

Sometimes these text-based missions turned out to be economic simulators. Once it even became a text version of the Space Rangers itself. And it's hard to tell what exactly it will turn out to be when you take the quest. Just what are developers expecting from players?

Final Fantasy X-2 has a lot of these. There's enough focus on combat to keep it from being a complete Gameplay Roulette, though. Two of these game sequences, a shooter and a bizarre game involving coins and math, were required to continue the game. The later in particular was annoying, because you either had to be very good at it, or had rare coins in your possession, to beat it. Since the tourney in Chapter 3 forces you to use four specific coins, you had to have some skill in getting multiples to get some of the quotas (especially Shinra's 50 quota grid).

Baldur's Gate II is a straightforward party-oriented Western RPG based on the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset — except for one part of the Watcher's Keep area that's a text-based dungeon crawl.

Threads of Fate requires you to play three platform jumping games before you can talk to Fancy Mel and continue your quest.

Chrono Trigger features a jet bike race in a post-apocalyptic future. There was also the portion where your weapons were confiscated and you had to use stealth to avoid enemies. Having Ayla in your party makes things a bit better, though.

At one point in Shadow Hearts: Covenant, most of the team is captured by the villains — the only one that escapes? Blanca, your wolf. This triggers a Stealth-Based Mission. Specifically, it is a direct parody of Metal Gear Solid: In order to hide behind walls, the wolf gets up on its hind legs and peers around the corner.

Fallout: New Vegas is a pretty straightforward FPS/RPG. Then the Dead Money DLC turns it into a pretty straightforward Survival Horror. In turn, the final run to the vault in that DLC is a Death Course of stealth, dodging speakers and holograms, and some platform jumping.

Fallout 3's Operation Anchorage expansion pack, set in a VR simulation of the liberation of Alaska from the Chinese, is a squad-based military action shooter.

Anachronox is a JRPG-style game with unskippable debris-dodging, rail-shooting, and turret-defense sequences. Also included are different minigames for character skills, from coin-flipping to democratic debate.

In Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes, you have to defeat an old man in a game of Reversi.

Ōkamiden includes a point where the game becomes a Rhythm Game with your brush (stylus). You have to pass this game to proceed with the story.

Dark Sun 1 game has an optional sidequest, where the party looses all their possessions and wakes up in a desert far from any friendly village and surrounded by enemies. Until they get their items back, they need to rely on spells and psionics. Mostly psionics, since PSPs regenerate even without rest. Fortunately, everybody on Athas is either a trained psionicist or a wild talent.

Shoot Em Up

If a Touhou game, a Shoot 'em Up series, has any decimals in its numerical listing, it's one of these. 7.5 and 10.5 are both fighting games, while 9.5 is... think Pokémon Snap, except now the Pokémon are trying to kill you. Sometimes with lasers. 12.8, while is a normal Shoot 'em Up in most respect, has a mechanic where you can freeze enemy bullets.

A bizarre twist on the concept is used in one of Yukari Yakumo's spellcards, where she uses her Reality Warper superpower to "change the game you are playing", and make you supposedly suffer attacks from every shooting game at once. In-game it's hard to tell the difference if dozens of lasers and hundreds of bullets are coming from space ships or monsters.

The PC-98 Touhou games had gameplay changes between games from the first one, where you hit a ball around, to the second one, which was the first Shoot 'em Up, to the third, which was a multiplayer shooter, and then the last two which went back to Shoot 'em Up

During the final mission in Metal Slug 3, the player characters board "Astro Slugs", and the game turns into a top-side scrolling shooter.

In the Shoot 'em UpDogyuun, the final stage involves you boxing two robots to death with a giant robot of your own...and there is no foreshadowing to this whatsoever unless you play the two player mode. Watch it here!

More lenient that other examples here, as your mech is completely invulnerable to damage.

Simulation Game

In Princess Maker 2, a Raising Sim, if you get your daughter a job as an Adventurer, you play through RPG-esque sequences in four different lands; indeed, half the content of the game is in this part.

Mild example: in both Descent: Freespace and Freespace 2, an ambush early in the game led by some enemy flagship inevitably results in you being part of the mission to take it down - in a bomber. Command comes up with some excuse as to resources being stretched to justify assigning a fighter squadron to bombing work, and your squadron leader gives you a quickie on bombing on the briefing screen. While not at all a big deal to players who've done the campaign at least once (you get assigned to bomber squads later on), it's incredibly disconcerting to new players for not only do bombers handle much differently to fighters, bombing capital ships is radically different to dogfighting. There's no bombing tutorial for both games either, in a series that otherwise has great tutorials for everything else (even escorting ships from bombers has its own tutorial).

The last in the series of Star Wars: Rogue Squadron games on the Gamecube did this when it introduced on-foot sections and/or levels to what had been a spacefighter combat game.

This is because the RS series is descended from Shadows of the Empire. SotE was mostly a 3rd/1st-person shooter on foot, but also featured a number of Unexpected Gameplay Change sequences. While the game as a whole was decent but unremarkable, one of the aforementioned sequences (The Battle of Hoth from Episode V) got enormous praise, so the developers decided to make a series out of it.

Freelancer has one mission you need to go into race course. It can be hard doing that mission using freighters.

In the final level of Hunt for Red October, it changes from a submarine Shoot 'em Up to an action platformer where you have to disarm bombs on the sub.

X-Wing Alliance does this. Most of the game it's a fun dog fighter/space superiority game. Then suddenly the final mission is an obstacle course. Although you could it coming from a mile off. Whole game building up to you piloting the Millennium Falcon at the Battle of Endor. Hmm, wonder what will happen now. That said, X-Wing did this too.

X3: Reunion has one in the second mission, where the space simulator combat of the rest of the game is replaced by an incredibly buggy, poorly implemented rail shooter sequence.

The Tokimeki Memorial series of games often feature RPG elements thrown in for some reason. If you go on a date with a girl there's a possibility of being attacked by thugs. Losing gives you a very bad reputation with your date. Winning ends the date but gives you a relationship bonus. Also during the school trip you'll be attacked by a mongoose, deer, or aliens but you're given a choice, run away alone (very very bad relationship hit), run away together (bad relationship hit) or fighting. Losing here will still give you a bonus to your relationship (because at least you tried) but winning will make the relationship much better. They can be especially tough fights if you've got no sports stats or after school club.

The second Tokimemo game makes it even worse if you end up having the same girlfriend as one of your two male friends making it IMPOSSIBLE TO WIN if you fail to beat them. Bonus points with Akane who you have to beat up her brother several times in order to win with her.

Anghel's route in Hatoful Boyfriend turns into an RPG battle when you burst in to save him from Doctor Shuu - er, the Dark Sorceror Wallenstein.

Sports Game

The darts minigame in Backyard Baseball 2005. One could also consider the Kooky Kraken in Backyard Skateboarding, where you do not control your skateboard at all.

The largely slow-paced Metal Gear Solid series usually features at least one hectic, run-and-gun segment per game. Metal Gear Solid 2 features a relatively long underwater swimming sequence.

And Metal Gear Solid 4 features a major fight scene between Snake and Ocelot. Nothing unusual about that, except both characters are piloting Metal Gears, Snake in REX, and Liquid in RAY. The only thing better than a bitchslap, is one involving 100-ton bipedal death machines. That doesn't really matter since it's completelyawesome.

Another boss battle does something similar in which the game adopts fighting game mechanics and different controls for the final fistfight between Snake and Ocelot.

Snake's Revenge featured Rush'n Attack-esque side-scrolling segments in which the only way Snake can conceal his presence whenever the enemy faces his direction is by crawling on the ground. Oddly enough, setting plastic explosives to kill enemies does not trigger the alarm like it does in the regular areas.

Relatedly, in Metal Gear Solid 3, if the player saves their game and turns it off right after Naked Snake is captured in a cell, the next time they turn it on they will be subject to an Easter Egg which isn't just a genre shift, it's a complete game shift.

A less extreme example, After planting the C3 on Shagohod´s fuel cells and defeating Volgin, EVA picks you up on her bike, and you ride the sidecar as troops, bike troops, and SHAGOHOD ITSELF (commandered by Volgin) chase both of you. Controls are the same (save for EVA driving the bike) but it plays essentially like a rail shooter, since you MUST go into first person mode. Following that, a slight change occurs again, as you must blow EVA´s bomb with a sniper rifle in order to drop Shagohod from a bridge.

And then there's the fun of the completely non-canon skateboarding minigame in the PS2 version of Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance - one of the most unexpected, stupid and yet somehow incredibly enjoyable worksafe minigames ever conceived.

The sword gameplay in Metal Gear Solid 2. Unlike all the weapons you have been using in the game, you have to use the Right Analog stick to perform slashing combos.

Also, Sequence 8 has all of the player's weapons disabled and you're only able to use the Apple of Eden while you cut off all of Cesare's resources.

In Assassin's Creed: Revelations Den Defenses are Tower Defense minigames, while the sections where you dive into Desmond's history after collecting Animus Data Fragments are first-person platformers that require the careful placement of geometric shapes to complete. All that's missing, especially during the final sequence, which takes place in Desmond's memory of Abstergo, is a psychotic female AI snarking at you.

III and IV have Fanorona and Nine Men's Morris mini games, and IV adds Draughts (Checkers) as well. All of these are complicated enough that you won't win unless you have a very good understanding of the game but not so complicated that your opponent can't be a near-perfect play AI. The computer never concedes and is happy for games to go on forever as long as it can deny the player a win. Nine Men's Morris is perhaps the worst since it effectively has a handicap system that prevents an early lead from becoming a certain victory. These games aren't necessary to complete the story but they are linked with achievements/challenges and so can rob the player of that Last Lousy Point.

Escape from Butcher Bay is for the most part a thrilling mashup of throat-slashing stealth and amazing first-person melee combat. Fighting an armed prison guard head-on is likely to get you killed. 2/3rds through you finally pick up a firearm of your own, which turns it into a 1st-person shooter. The REAL gameplay change though, comes after you get access to a nigh-indestructible mech and get to crush all those enemies you hid from for most of the game in pure power fantasy style.

Splinter Cell: Blacklist, despite being a third person action-stealth game, requires players to beat two First-Person Shooter segments as Briggs (with a totally different pre-set inventory) for two parts of the train station mission. While the creators were decent enough to restrict the pacifist requirements to Sam's parts, as well as remove the "Totally Unseen" challenge from the map, playing a clunky assault section with only a handful of non-lethal gadgets (restricting "Ghost Points" and making perfect stealth even harder) makes it of very mixed popularity.

Survival Horror

In Resident Evil 4, Del Lago (The Lake) boss battle occurs in a off-board motor boat in the middle of a lake, using harpoons. Additionally, for this installment's token escape sequence, you board a jet ski with Ashley and pilot your way through a relative direct but collapsing cave system (including jump ramps). Except for the levels where Ashley drives that slow truck, there are no other vehicular combat or vehicle-driving parts in the game.

Resident Evil 6 has a couple of Stealth Based Missions, and a notoriously difficult high speed chase through town, with no warning, foreshadowing, or chance to practice. What's worse, is you're forced to let your A.I. partner have a go at the wheel for half the race, regardless of which character you choose. Have fun, chumps!

Dead Space is somewhat notorious for its shifts from a survival horror to a Shoot 'em Up kind of mission on two occasions. The first time you are defending the ship from incoming asteroids and later you're fighting a boss. Both are regarded as being annoyingly difficult even ignoring the high standards set by the achievements.

Dead Space 3 continues the trend by suddenly throwing in a rail-shooter segment completely out of nowhere, and you also have to fly a ship while blasting space debris at the same time!

Pathfinder Adventure Path "Kingmaker" is a giant sandbox in which the players are granted a royal charter to tame a wild land full of beasts and monsters. Then, having beaten the first big boss in the game, their patrons donate a sizable fund and a second royal charter to settle that wilderness. The players suddenly have to build cities, buildings, and terrain improvements when just before they were dungeon-crawling adventurers. For the rest of the game, they alternate between both roles.

Pathfinder likes doing this:

The first part of Curse of the Crimson Throne briefly moves from a grid into abstracted movement for a dramatic rooftop chase sequence.

The second part of Council of Thieves is mostly an opera. The players are required to read their lines for about twenty pages.

Third Person Shooter

Jazzpunk has this trope as an occasional incentive to explore the various levels. For example, a frog wants to hack a nearby coffee shop Wi-Fi password, but his Augmented Reality goggles are located in the middle of the road. Cue a sudden match of Frogger.

About half way through the game Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, the game switches from a bounty hunt where you go from town to town collecting outlaws to a survival game where you are the outlaw, the money you have been collecting is useless and everyone is out to kill you.

Giants: Citizen Kabuto did this four times. It changes from 3rd person shooter to tactical RTS to 3rd person magic-em-up to 3rd person rampage stomp-em-up. Seemingly at will. The game had 3 races, each with a different play style. Each race was firmly rooted in a single genre but the campaign cycled through the races to tell its story, leading to this trope. Multiplayer was an aversion due to the lack of race changing.

The sequel was worse in this regard; other than some air close rage combat that was well intergrated, at the end of one of the stages it turned into a fighting game, with horrible boundaries that would make the Lord Of Tekken rage.

Jet Force Gemini is a gory, fast-paced 3D shoot 'em up - except for the one stage that's a kart racer. Complete with power-ups and a multiplayer option. Makes a bit more sense if you remember the game's engine was originally written for Diddy Kong Racing, but still...

Gears Of War 2 averts the trope. There is a chapter which has a stealth mission which was actually cut from the campaign, but can still be played. At the very beginning you are given the option of doing the stealth mission or going in guns blazing. So, it is not mandatory. In addition, if you do the stealth mission and are detected, the game just switches over to straight combat, just like if you took the guns blazing option in the beginning. So, all it does is give you the option of using a different style of gameplay, but it is not enforced, even if that is the method you try to use.

Turn Based Strategy

Subverted in Disgaea: A group of Prinnies, knowing they can't defeat Laharl in combat, challenge him to a baseball game, complete with diamond and Gratuitous English voice shouting "Play ball!" Laharl turns to Etna: "Kill 'em." Cue one of the most ridiculously fun fights in the game (throw a Prinny and it explodes, and all the enemies are Prinnies).

Many of the missions were horribly designed, nearly impossible to control flight simulators. What truly makes this awful is that while flying itself was very straightforward and easy, the mandatory missions forced the player to use the poorest plane available. Imagine if the player had to do the street racing segments with a street sweeper, the slowest motor vehicle in the game.

Vice City had a boat mission with horrible controls. "It's time for the Lance Vance Dance", for example. Vice City Stories has the Boomshine Blowout mission, where you have to remove crates from a maze of a burning warehouse with a forklift.

Several of the GTA games from Vice City onward have 3rd or 1st person rail-shooter segments.

Grand Theft Auto V takes this to the extreme with some of its optional stealth approaches. In the page image, for example, Michael can infiltrate a skyscraper by posing as a new janitor; in order to maintain his cover and plant bombs, however, the player has to move between bomb points with a mop and bucket. Bearing in mind the series has been labelled a "Murder Simulator", the entire sequence requires controlling Michael as he cleans up numerous muddy footprints around the hallways, even to the point you have to occasionally rinse the mop to prevent dirt smears.

In Dead Rising, the second-to-last part of the story suddenly puts you into a gun turret fighting off a tank. Then for the final boss you lose all your weapons and have to fight him with those hand-to-hand moves you probably never bothered to learn because a chainsaw always worked so much better.

Saints Row IV has a few of these. Throughout the game, you'll find yourself in a top-down tank battle game a-la Combat, a side-scrolling beat-'em-up, and a text adventure or two. Saints Row: The Third also featured some of the same brief gameplay switcheroos, only they were all confined to one particular mission.

The Legacy of Kain series goes through several of these. Blood Omen is a top-down RPG, Soul Reaver and its sequel were very similar to each other but nothing like Blood Omen 2. Defiance, while remaining a third person action game, is probably more akin to Devil May Cry than anything. Nosgoth is just a multiplayer game with very little (if any) story.

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